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......The evolution of the Oscar winner for Best PictureFri, 18 Aug 2017 04:59:42 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngAs Time Goes By…https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com
Movie Quote of the Day – Melinda and Melinda, 2004 (dir. Woody Allen)https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/movie-quote-of-the-day-melinda-and-melinda-2004-dir-woody-allen/
https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/movie-quote-of-the-day-melinda-and-melinda-2004-dir-woody-allen/#respondMon, 09 Jun 2014 07:58:02 +0000http://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/movie-quote-of-the-day-melinda-and-melinda-2004-dir-woody-allen/the diary of a film history fanatic: Ellis Moonsong: Why do things that start off so promisingly always have a way of ending up in the dump? Melinda Robicheaux: Not for everyone. Ellis Moonsong: Well, for anybody with any imagination. You know, life is manageable enough if you keep your hopes modest. The…]]>

Ellis Moonsong: Why do things that start off so promisingly always have a way of ending up in the dump?Melinda Robicheaux: Not for everyone.Ellis Moonsong: Well, for anybody with any imagination. You know, life is manageable enough if you keep your hopes modest. The minute you allow yourself sweet dreams you run the risk of them crashing down.

This wagon just about rolls along on one wheel…but an engaging plot and prototype superhero are not enough to save Cimarron from its director’s terminal lack of imagination

Director: Wesley Ruggles

Producer: William LeBaron, Wesley Ruggles

Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

Written by: Howard Estabrook, from the novel by Edna Ferber

Starring: Richard Dix, Irene Dunne, Estelle Taylor

I’m quite relieved not to have to watch another war film for a while. Those things are gruelling.

I know nothing about Cimarron, which won Best Picture for 1930/1931, except that (based on the lurid film poster shown above) it looks like a western. I’m not a fan of the genre for its own sake, but good storytelling should transcend genre, so I’m determined not to be put off…

I’ve found a spectacularly low-quality Korean DVD on Amazon – the best I could do. This in itself does not portend well: Cimarron has evidently not been deemed to be worth digital restoration. Neither does it seem to have made it into any popular canon of film classics: it appears on no AFI or BFI hit lists that I am aware of, and is rarely screened on TV. Even the name is unmemorable, and gives no clue as to the subject matter. It seems silly to judge a film on its name, but I can’t help but feel that the awkwardly unusual ‘Cimarron‘ (how is it even pronounced?) might have contributed to the movie’s slide into obscurity.

The Hollywood novelist

Before watching the film for the first time, back in January (before this whole blogging enterprise got temporarily derailed for reasons I won’t bother going into), I’d been wondering who in tarnation Edna Ferber had been, who features so prominently on the poster (‘Edna Ferber’s colossal Cimarron!‘). I felt that “Edna Ferber” lent a gigglesome aspect to the whole affair, my meandering mind having conflated Dame Edna Everage with a Furby toy, which together with the over-the-top artwork and suspicion that the film might be rubbish, ill-disposed me to take Cimarron seriously (I’m basically picturing a Furby wearing Dame Edna glasses right now, are you?).

Like both All Quiet on the Western Front and Wings, Cimarron takes its source material from recent history, delving only slightly further back in time to the opening of the Unassigned Lands to white settlement. Through the lives of the central characters, we see the community of Osage, Oklahoma develop from a tiny frontier town first settled following the Oklahoma Land Race of 1889, to a bustling city in the 1930s.

It’s shamelessly patriotic – perhaps after the existential turmoil and uncertainty of international war, part of Cimarron‘s appeal at the time was its reassuringly inward-looking all-Americanness. Although some attempt is made to sympathise with Native Americans, it’s pretty much a white-washed – pun intended – tale of glory.

For the film is at turgid pains to convey that the characters are Making History. The characters themselves actually refer to this in numerous places throughout the film – and a particular narrative low is towards the end, when the title card flashes up:

“By President Roosevelt’s signature, the territory becomes the state of Oklahoma…..”

This fact – which admittedly does have some relevance to the plot – is then followed quite unnecessarily by a close-ups, first of the President’s signature, and then of a grainy photograph of the president – not especially renowned for his Oklahoma-related activities – himself. It makes no sense to include this except to rouse a sense of patriotic nostalgia in the audience (bearing in mind that these events were within the life experience of many viewers at the time). And, you know, people might not have realised that this is a film about AMERICAN HISTORY. IN THE MAKING.

Just in case anyone forgot who Teddy Roosevelt was or what he looked like

Not being American myself, pretty much everything I know about the historical events referred to is based on this movie and a quick scan of Wikipedia – so please forgive any lapses of ignorance in the subject matter.

Synopsis

The story revolves around the lives of the brilliant trial-lawyer, newspaper editor and improbably named Yancey Cravat (played by Richard Dix), and his intelligent and fashionable wife Sabra (Irene Dunne). The Cravats move from their comfortable family home in Wichita to the new settlement of Osage, and make a new life there with Yancey as editor of the local paper. The film depicts their new lives and the development of Osage and of Oklahoma state.

Ironically, for a film about pioneers, Cimarron does absolutely nothing to build on the artistic advancements represented by All Quiet on the Western Front and Wings before it. It may not actually represent a regression (I hesitate to relegate any film to the same species of turkey as The Broadway Melody) – but it’s no leap forward. Primarily, it bears the hallmarks of an over-ambitious project that has massively exceeded the abilities of its producers.

Oops we ran out of time

First, there is the time scale. The movie spans 40 years, but the second two decades are compressed into the last 15 minutes. It’s the movie equivalent of addressing an envelope, only to realise you’ve started too big and too far to the right, as your handwriting becomes increasingly small and squished against the edge. Between the titles “1907” and “1929”, literally the only ‘action’ is another intertitle: “OIL-“. Without this the final scene would make no sense, but it’s a lazy way to move the story on. The effect is that the final events of the film happen so abruptly that I for one struggled to make sense of the narrative. Suddenly the film, which has been virtually the Yancey Cravat Show, turns out to be a two-hander. I found myself wanting to rewind and re-assess everything I’d just watched.

Spoiler alert: America is the greatest!

In fact the title cards caused me problems from the start. The movie opens with this irritating message:

“A nation rising to greatness through the work of men and women…New country opening…Raw land blossoming…Crude towns growing into cities…Territories becoming rich states…”

I realise the ellipses are meant to create an exciting sense of ongoing action, but the effect for me was more like the screen-writers couldn’t be bothered to write in full sentences. I envisage a narrator making circular “let’s move this along” motions with their hand, and adding “yadda yadda yadda” at the end.

And it gives the game away: the film’s attempts to sympathise with the Indian predicament can only be hollow – it’s pretty clear that manifest destiny is the name of the game and that Cimarron celebrates this as a ‘nation rising to greatness (and on the same subject, the tagline ‘Terrific as All Creation’ is a line in the film, used by Yancey to describe the Land Race itself).

As terrific as all creation! And by ‘creation’ we mean ‘horse race’

Far more pertinent to the events in hand is the next title, which helpfully situates us in time and place:

“In 1889 President Harrison opened the vast Indian Oklahoma lands for white settlement…..

2,000,000 acres free for the taking, poor and rich pouring in, swarming the border, waiting for the starting gun, at noon, April 22nd…”

Although the poster promises action and horses, in fact the Land Race at the start of the movie is virtually the only exterior action. This has been filmed on an epic scale, with rows of horses and wagons racing across the plain. However, although the sweeping vistas recall some of the battle sequences in Wings and All Quiet, the footage fares badly in comparison with the innovative cinematography of either of those two films. It really offers nothing more than a montage of slightly different camera angles. An unforgivable continuity error reveals some sloppy editing: a stray barrel appears rolling in the same place at different times.

Faked close-ups of Yancey and Dixie Lee (with the actor riding a ‘horse’ in front of projection screen) look okay and are mercifully brief, but these offer a clue as to why the scene isn’t more satisfying: in the scale depicted, there is little sense of how it is personally experienced by either Yancey or Dixie. An inability satisfactorily to merge the film’s big themes to the lives of the main characters is a major flaw throughout the film – of which more later.

Lining up for the starting gun at the start of the Oklahoma Land Race

(Special effects are not this movie’s forte. When the villain Stanley Fields attempts to shoot Yancey, we see a shot fired at a building just behind Yancey and a full second elapses before his hat jumps up. We are then shown the bullet hole in the hat and the bullet is described as having been ‘inches’ from Yancey’s skull).

Then (in case any of you who have actually seen the film is wondering about the elephant in the room) the film is over-shadowed by race issues (TCM’s review for example describes the black servant boy Isaiah and the Jewish tailor Sol Levy as ‘painful stereotypes’). This is a shame, because for all its weaknesses, from a story-telling perspective Cimarron has plenty to offer: compelling characters, action and entertainment. But structurally it just does not hold up, and the direction can best be described as ‘adequate’. Wesley Ruggles had a few modest hits after Cimarron, but he was not a visionary like William Wellman or Lewis Milestone.

The Leading Man – a prototype superhero?

Richard Dix bears a distinctive honour shared by only a very few: a silent movie star to achieve success in the Talkies. He had been best known for roles such as John McTavish in Cecil B. deMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments and, funnily enough, portraying Native American Wing Foot in 1929’s Redskin. (The latter is, by all accounts, an astonishingly sensitive depiction of a Navajo man trying to reconcile his traditional culture with a westernised education. For further information you could do a lot worse than this thoughtful review by Movies, Silently, a blog which always makes me want to hit up Amazon for a bunch of silent movie DVDs).

Dix, who was nominated an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Cimarron (he lost out to Lionel Barrymore – that’s Drew’s great-uncle – in A Free Soul), is undoubtedly well-cast as the vigorous Yancey, whose searing intellect and leadership quality is matched only by his physical prowess and shooting skills. The actor was a ruggedly handsome man and his screen presence is beyond doubt, as he devours every scene with an old-fashioned masculine charisma. Dix also also manages some comic flourishes, particularly during his two major speeches, leading a church service and at the trial of Dixie Lee.

In its review of Redskin, Movies, Silently praises Dix’s range: “As an actor, Dix was a powerhouse. He had natural screen presence that allowed him to quietly take control of his scenes. However, unlike many other equally forceful stars, he was able to dial things back to convey softer emotions. Redskin called for all of his versatility.”

Not having seen Redskin, I will have to take the blog’s word for it, but unfortunately this range is not fully apparent in Cimarron. He cannot be said ‘quietly’ to take control of scenes: he attacks them with a ferocity that threatens to demolish everything in his path. Nor does he exactly ‘dial it back’ too often – his quieter moments are often heavy with condescension, mere opportunities to explain patronisingly to his wife why he had to kill a man/stand against her in court to defend another woman/abandon her for years on end, rather than naturalistic character development.

Dix glares and glowers through every scene (did he get a headache from straining his eyes? I often wonder the same about Robert Pattinson in Twilight), but his acting is not so much bad, as in a style which seems very over-the-top and I wonder if this lack of subtlety is a hangover from his silent movie experience. Dix’s facial expressions appear to be intended to be viewed from a distance of fifty feet. Wesley Ruggles must also take some of the blame for this, favouring as he does set-pieces over close-ups. When close-ups occur, they have tremendous effect either dramatically or in moving the action forward, and I lament the fact that there are not more in the film.

The effect is devastatingly cartoonish. Yancey may be entertaining to watch, but the many layers we are given to understand he has are just not credible: he is supposed to be a gentleman who forgives a young woman for cheating him out of his land, but who also carves notches in the handle of his gun. He purports to be a loving husband and father, yet abandons his family for the thrill of adventuring to new lands. He is a revered pillar of the community, yet a free-spirited liberal who has a preternatural understanding of society’s downtrodden and speaks up for the underdog.

And Dix’s vigorous performance is at odds with a character who behaves mercurially – how could a man who is so solidly anchored in each scene ever become a drifter?

But on the other hand Dix can only work with what he’s got, and the story just asks far too much of his character. If his apparent omnipotence destroys any credible interaction with his wife and companions, it is nevertheless somehow irresistible, and I think it’s interesting to think of Yancey almost as a comic book superhero, one whose thirst for adventure is like kryptonite. Viewed in this way, Yancey and Sabra’s story makes a lot more sense.

The Leading Lady

Irene Dunne is simply magnificent as Sabra, ably portraying each stage of the character’s life from lovestruck young wife willing to follow Yancey anywhere, to newspaper editor and, ultimately, sexagenarian Congresswoman. (Dunne was similarly nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, but lost out to older actress Marie Dressler in Min and Bill).

She was a leading exponent of “smell the fart” acting

A large part of the plot revolves around the tension between Sabra’s traditional, conservative views and Yancey’s progressive ones. This reaches two main crisis-points: at the trial of Dixie Lee and in the acceptance of the Cherokee Ruby as the Cravats’ daughter-in-law. Next to Dix’s overpowering superhero, Dunne remains authentically human: Sabra may need to develop her ideas about Native Americans and certain women, but her every word and deed rings with emotional honesty and we sympathise with her because of it.

She put the ‘O!’ in ‘Osage’!

I once stayed in a hotel in Tanzania that had a sign above the reception desk stating WOMEN OF MORAL TURPITUDE NOT ALLOWED IN ROOMS. Readers, I fear Dixie Lee is one such morally turpid female. The film, somewhat prudishly (given we are still pre-Code), never openly acknowledges that Dixie is a prostitute; we are left to draw this conclusion ourselves from Dixie’s entourage of garishly painted girlfriends and various hints in the script.

In a well-worn storyline, Sabra doesn’t like how friendly Yancey seems to be with Dixie. Then, when Yancey resurfaces out of the blue after an absence of five years, and learns that Sabra has led a campaign to get Dixie Lee sent to jail, his first act is to defend Dixie in court against his wife. He alone has realised that Dixie is forced to earn a living this way because of her tragic life of hard luck and mistreatment.

“Without her you’d have had no fun/Since March of 1861”

There is real drama in the conflict between, on the one hand, Sabra’s moral disgust at Dixie’s lifestyle and her sense of betrayal by Yancey, who has taken Dixie’s side against her for reasons Sabra cannot comprehend and suspects might not be pure; and on the other hand, the sad truth of Dixie’s lot in life and Yancey’s compassion towards her. How will this be resolved?

Again however, the Big Ideas trump credible character motivation. Despite being publicly humiliated in court by her husband who has only just returned from a five year absence, Sabra’s capitulation to Yancey’s way of thinking and her forgiveness of him is sudden and complete. Yancey delivers a preachy and pompous speech, explaining that the ‘real criminal’ was ‘social order’ rather than Dixie herself. I found the ending of The Simpsons episode, ‘Bart After Dark’, when Marge’s attempts to shut down the Maison Derrière are frustrated by the merry ditty ‘We Put the Spring! in Springfield!’ more believable. And again, the idea of parachuting in a hero who is apparently answerable to no-one in order to fight social injustice is more in keeping with the idea of Yancey as a mythical Superman-like figure than a real person.

The advent of colour on film

Cimarron is the first winner to feature non-white cast members, and this in itself must be viewed as an evolutionary step forward. The sale of Indian lands, the fate of Native Americans and their role in US society is openly discussed and challenged, and an interracial marriage is a key plot point. However, as noted above, this is severely undermined by the fervently patriotic tone of the film from the very beginning.

Yancey – ever on the side of the victim – has a professed respect and appreciation of native Americans. He teaches his son the meaning of Indian words and approves of his interracial marriage to Ruby, the Indian girl (while Sabra is horrified). During the church service when the collection is being made, he pointedly exempts the Indians present from contributing, and adds that “a Cherokee is too smart to put anything in the contribution box of a race that’s robbed him of his birthright.” To commemorate Oklahoma’s entry into statehood he pens a pro-Indian editorial which goes on to become a classic.

But the the Cherokees themselves are silent – never more than blank-faced parts of the scenery, there to make Yancey look good. For he is also obsessed with taking a new piece of the opened lands and Making History.

Oh look, a little Negro boy

Cimarron is notably the first Oscar Best Picture to feature a black character, the adolescent servant boy Isaiah. Eugene ‘Pineapple’ Jackson had already found fame as one of the Little Rascals (a series of films that actually did break racial ground), and it is easy to see why: with an adorable face, trademark hair (hence the nickname) and knockout charisma, he’s a little ball of energy that deserves far better than the treatment Isaiah gets in the film.

Isaiah is meant to be loveable, and his story arc begins promisingly as the servant boy of Sabra’s family in Wichita who is transfixed by Yancey’s tales of adventure and begs to be allowed to go with him. When Isaiah is discovered to have smuggled himself onto the Cravats’ wagon halfway to Osage, he is also revealed to have pluck and spirit, and with his hair style and tendency towards the madcap, could have been a beautifully conceived comic character.

Sadly, despite these seeds of hope, the egregiously racist comic relief blossoms at his expense. His skin colour alone affords hilarity: “Ise-Ise-Ise-Coloured boy!” stutters one character, and everyone laughs. Use of African American Vernacular English is also likely to cause controversy among certain quarters (did black people really pronounce it ‘Okeyhomey?’).

When Yancey takes the church service – the one where Cherokees are invited but not expected to contribute and where the town’s lone Jew is even welcome – he opens with:

“Fellow citizens, I have been called upon to conduct this first meeting of the Osage First Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian – Hebrew – church.”

But only moments earlier, some ‘comedy gold’ has been created by Isaiah dressing up smart and marching his way to the service, much to the mirth of passersby and then of Yancey and Sabra. So kind is Yancey to his employee that rather than explicitly ban Isaiah from attending church, he explains he needs him to stay at home and guard the house, on ‘patrol duty’. “Patrol duty? Yessir!” is the response of Isaiah, who is basically credited with none of a human being’s logical faculties.

“You can’t buy loyalty like that” says Yancey to Sabra of Isaiah, and depressingly, he means it as a compliment. As this and the prohibition on attending church shows, Isaiah is depicted as ‘loveable’ in the sense of loving a family pet rather than a real person. When Isaiah is killed in genuinely tragic circumstances (demonstrating that the trope of the black guy being first to be bumped off started even earlier than you thought), the child Cim says ‘What’s happened to Isaiah?’ and no-one says anything – Yancey just carries him in and then turns away with the body, as if holding a dead dog. Yancey evinces more sadness at the death of Isaiah’s killer, The Kid, because he used to know him.

Despite his obvious star quality, Eugene Jackson never achieved any greater success. He went on to forge a career of sorts playing bit-parts in Hollywood films over the next 60 years (his last performance was as ‘One Armed Bass Player’ in 1991’s The Addams Family). Hollywood is famously fickle and there’s many a talented young actor who never delivers on young promise, especially when that promise is as a child star. But casting an eye down Jackson’s filmography, six decades playing stereotyped roles like ‘Shoe Shine Boy’; ‘Piccaninny’; ‘Bartender’; ‘Cab Driver’; ‘Saxophonist’; ‘Office Janitor’ perhaps offers a clue as to why his talent was never borne out. Maybe if he’d come of age in a different era he could have fulfilled his Will Smith-like potential.

There is surprisingly little about on the history of black people in early Hollywood, but these sites are worth a look for anyone interested: Blackflix, Midnight Ramble, FilmSlateMagazine. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait until the next non-white face in a Best Picture winner?

You’re doing fine Oklahoma, Oklahoma, OK!

Cimarron tries excruciatingly hard to convey Big Themes – gender politics, the role of Native Americans, societal prejudices, to name a few – but the parts of the film that are most gripping relate to the human interest elements: the individual characters and how they cope with events. These elements are as wheels lost on the bumpy road that is this film’s terrible script.

Nominated in the same year as Cimarron was Lewis Milestone’s screwball classic The Front Page, and in hindsight it is clearly a travesty that the latter was kept off the top spot. Looking at the Best Picture winners that came before Cimarron, two out of three are war films, and it seems likely that the Academy is swayed by theme: a film whose subject-matter is suitably lofty blinds them to a comedy, even when the latter is technically and artistically superior. It will be interesting to see how this trend continues.

Right, I’m off to watch Oklahoma! (why are there so many films about Oklahoma? It looks like a really boring place).

Next up: 5. Grand Hotel. Where there is Garbo, there is glamour. Can’t wait!

Written by: George Abbott (screenplay), Maxwell Anderson (adaptation), Del Andrews (Adaption and dialogue), from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque

Starring: Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim

Happy New Year! Let’s ring in 2014 with a seasonal visit to one of history’s darkest chapters!!!

I must apologise for the delay in publishing this post. I’ll be honest, I struggled with this one. I started with all good intentions to post it on Remembrance Day…then Remembrance Day came and I couldn’t quite work myself up into the mood to watch the film (and it is a film for which you have to be in the mood). I finally watched it two days later, and figured that at long as I published the post in November, it would still sort of be Armistice-adjacent…But then I realised that All Quiet on the Western Front was the first Oscar Best Picture to be adapted from a novel, which I decided I really needed to read in order to be able to comment on the film…which set me back a further week, and then work went crazy and Christmas went crazy and suddenly it was January.

So. At long last here is my post on All Quiet on the Western Front, which won the Oscar for Best Picture for 1929/1930. In time for the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

My reluctance to watch the film and write this post

I approached Wings with a slightly patronising curiosity and The Broadway Melody with unbridled enthusiasm; the former rewarded me with a wonderful discovery and the latter a stinker (albeit with redeeming features). But without yet having watched All Quiet, I already know that in evolutionary terms it will be generations ahead of its Oscar Best Picture predecessors.

Silent film aficionados may appreciate Wings as a masterpiece; The Broadway Melody may be of academic interest to musical comedy aficionados; but All Quiet on the Western Front is so famous that its very title, from the original English translation of Remarque’s novel, Im Westen Nichts Neue (literally, Nothing New on the Western Front) has long since embedded itself in our culture. You might not have heard of some of the early Oscar Best Picture winners, but everyone has heard of All Quiet, whether you’ve read the book, seen the Oscar winning Hollywood film or seen one of the various other film adaptations. Most people I speak to remember watching or reading it in school, which perhaps goes some way to explaining my reluctance to watch the film.

If I’m dragging my heels over watching All Quiet, it’s not because of any low expectations as to quality. I feel confident it will be very, very good – so good I feel a sort of reverence towards it which is somehow intertwined with the reverence I feel in remembering those who were killed in the First World War itself. There is none of the sense of mystery or anticipation I experienced ahead of the earlier films – rather, the mere thought of watching the DVD I ordered from Amazon (the limited edition Universal 100th Anniversary Collectors’ Series Blue-Ray release, no less) of All Quiet fills me with nobleness and virtue. I take Remembrance Day seriously and wear my poppy with pride, consciously honouring those who fell in the two world wars (and it’s a big diamante poppy brooch, which for David Mitchell’s information is far more practical than, and involved a far bigger donation than most people give for, a paper poppy. And if it happens to chime with my dress sense more than a paper poppy, so what? The pinning mechanism actually works, it doesn’t look disrespectfully crumpled and rubbish within five minutes, and it doesn’t fall off leaving just the useless, naked dressmaker’s pin on your lapel while you wander round oblivious). I never fail to be moved by the solemnity of the two minute silence, and – being possessed of a rather fervid imagination – find it easy to become melancholy in absolutely no time at all, musing over the sacrifices those men and women made. Yes, All Quiet is going to be good, but it’s also going to be gruelling, and watching it does feel like more of a duty than a pleasure.

Includes 36-page book!

The truth is, I am inwardly whining about watching another war film, already. We only just had Wings! At this stage, two thirds of all Oscar Best Picture winners are about the First World War. The Broadway Melody seems like an all-too brief and glittery respite which for all its flaws, I am already missing.

Then I watch All Quiet On the Western Front, and it is every bit as brilliant as I am expecting. However, when I read the novel, I am completely blown away. So to speak.

Sorry.

The film may be excellent, but it is, among other things, subject to the technological limitations of the time; the book on the other hand is as fresh and raw as if it were written 10 years ago instead of 90. Change a few of the details and you feel it could credibly have been written by a veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan. This left me in something of a quandary over how to write about the film, which the book had completely overshadowed.

Wear your poppy with A VISUAL METAPHOR FOR BLOODSHED

But this blog isn’t about novels, it’s about films. So having left enough time for the impact of the novel to clear from my impressions of the movie version, and for my reverence for those who fell in the First World War to untangle itself from my appreciation of the film, I think I’m finally ready to write this post.

The plot

The war has started. An elderly German schoolmaster persuades sixteen-year-old Paul Bäumer (Ayres) and his fellow classmates to enlist in the name of the fatherland. The boys join the army and are sent to the western Front.

Survival of the fittest

A big criticism of The Broadway Melody, both then and now, was that after years of innovation in silent movies, the film utterly failed to exploit the medium of film: it often seemed like a (somewhat amateurish) recording of a (somewhat amateurish) stage play. All Quiet on the Western Front marks a return to the dynamic film-making and story-telling evident in Wings, and reassures us that The Broadway Melody was indeed a blip in this respect – presumably while directors got to grips with Talkie technology. Apart from anything else, All Quiet is a reminder of just how advanced motion picture directing already was by the advent of the Talkies. A war film, with its prolonged battle scenes and action sequences, is in many ways the ideal material for that difficult transition from silence to sound, naturally relying on action over dialogue to tell the story. It sure makes the whole concept of The Broadway Melody seem nothing short of foolhardy: for your first foray into Talkies, pick a genre that relies on sound over everything else! I can’t help wondering whether the movie musical were viewed at the time like some kind of hideous Darwinian mistake. No wonder it would be more than two decades before another musical won the Oscar Best Picture (An American in Paris, in 1951).

Film versus book

The briefest of comparisons between the book and the film reminds you that there are certain aspects of a novel that cannot easily be reproduced on screen. But on the other hand, film has certain alternative techniques at its disposal. On the whole, the choices made in adapting the novel of All Quiet to the film maximise the opportunities that film affords and dispense with aspects of the novel that do not easily lend themselves to a visual medium.

For example, the novel is told in the first person by Paul, and jumps around in a series of flashbacks and reminiscences. Chronologically, the novel begins about halfway through the story. The opening scene is the men of B Company tucking into a bountiful feast…only two pages later is it revealed, through the soldiers’ paradoxical horror and delight, and the cook’s blackly comic bewilderment, that the sheer quantity of food is a result of the meal having been prepared for the hundred and fifty men who had formed B Company that morning. By the time B Company returns for dinner, only 80 are left.

It is a shocking beginning that has such impact that I was initially surprised the film opens with a woman mopping the floor of a room while an elderly man polishes the doorknob:

“Man: Thirty thousand!

Maid: From the Russians?

Man: No, from the French. From the Russians, we capture more than that every day.”

(I must admit, that while my Blu-Ray version has been digitally restored in HD, the sound quality is poor and I had to google these opening lines to understand what they were saying).

I wondered why the writers had squandered the opportunity for such a dramatic beginning in favour of this mundane scene. However, I soon changed my mind as it became clear that the writers had made a wise decision to tell the story in chronological order from start to finish, allowing us to invest in the characters as their story develops, and show the impact of events without the tricky business of recreating the interior monologue which takes up much of the novel. The cleaner’s enthusiasm and pride in the German war effort, from which he himself is safely removed, neatly sets up a key theme of the novel: that of anger towards an ignorant older generation which willingly send their young men to a war, the horrors of which they know nothing.

From lightness to the dark: the doorways to Hell

After that first snatch of dialogue, the door to the room opens onto a bright and pretty street framed in the doorway. The camera exits through it to a vision of the old cleaner’s pride: in the sunshine, troops are marching with smart regularity while women and children wave them smilingly on; well-dressed ladies are shopping and people are going about their business while a military band strikes up.

Just whistle while you work, cos Hitler is a twerp – oops no, wrong War

Every shot, even that of a market stall, is architecturally framed: geometric doors, arches and windows dominate the screen. The camera eventually pulls us from the happy bustling and pageantry in the street into an airy classroom, where two large windows flank a blackboard covered in Greek writing. The overriding visual impression in the first few minutes is of light, space, cleanliness, symmetry – in short, of civilisation.

Latine dictum, sit altum videtur

In front of the blackboard stands the schoolmaster, forming a tableau with with the windows either side of him and the street scene beyond. He is fervently exhorting and manipulating his pupils to enlist, as if carrying the patriotism and fanfare of the street through the windows and into the room where the schoolboys sit quietly behind orderly rows of desks. Rousingly he notes that ‘if losses there must be, then let us remember the Latin phrase, which must have come to the lips of many a Roman when he stood embattled in a foreign land: Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori!’ The concept of war is filtered through the uniforms and brass instruments of the troops marching outside, through those large and civilised windows, through the kind of classical education which represented the pinnacle of the civilised world.

Duly roused, the boys decide on the spot to enlist en masse, and throw their school papers in the air in ticker-tape parade style celebration. Someone crosses out the Greek on the blackboard and scrawls ‘Nach Paris’ (‘to Paris’), before all the boys rowdily march off together, singing their own patriotic song in imitation of the soldiers outside. We see them pass happily by the two big windows, and then the camera lingers on the empty classroom, floor and desks strewn with papers.

“I’ll go!”

Afterwards, the abandoned, messy room is the first sign of a gradual descent from the rarefied heights of civilisation to the primitive depths of war.

The beginnings of disorder

The first step down is at the training academy, where there are signs that things are out of kilter: the boys’ uniforms don’t fit and they aren’t allowed any leave to meet girls to impress. These ambitions are thwarted by Himmelstoss, a character who in the initial street scene is depicted as a friendly postman, but has now ‘changed his uniform for another’ and become a power-crazed and sadistic drill-sergeant, constantly forcing the boys to lie down in the mud. The muddy training grounds are a foretaste of what awaits them at the front; although by and large, visually the training scenes are framed by more geometrical windows, arches and cleanly-swept courtyards. Even the mud is neatly ploughed into regular troughs.

The first major change comes at the front, when the boys arrive by train at a bombed out village. In stark contrast to the town they have left, buildings are in ruins, the road is a mudbath, and chaos reins with carriages, horses and troops hurrying around confusedly. The camera alternates between viewing the confusion at street level, and dispassionately viewing the scene through another large window, from the peace and safety of an unidentified interior. It is from this viewpoint that we see a bomb go off and then up close, the boys all dive for cover. There are no more nice windows after that: it’s as if this window, the location of which is never explained, exists solely to represent the final divide between the civilised, ordered, sheltered world, and the chaotic unprotected world of war.

The final frontier

A room without a view

The boys’ first digs are a ramshackle room in a dilapidated old barn with no sleeping quarters or food. The windows are boarded up and the doorway only ever seems to reveal rain and darkness.

A soldier through the door…looking slightly different to the marching troops viewed through the doorway in the opening

However, the real low point is the dugout at the trenches, a nightmarish parody of the light and airy rooms so prominent at the beginning of the film. Instead of sharp, clean lines, crudely assembled beams soften the corners and lower the already low ceiling. With every shell that goes off, the dugout shakes and dust showers down inside the cramped space. The dark walls are rough and dirty, and the men are dirty too. The more shells that go off, the more broken down and filled with rubble the bunker becomes. Rats are jokingly referred to and vigorously attacked with spades, in a scene that prefigures some of the hand-to-hand combat to come (although one that sanitises the source novel – I found the descriptions of rat infestations almost more harrowing than the battle scenes themselves). It is not hard to believe either the terror of the soldiers, or their comradeship in surviving the blasts together in this confined space.

Having illustrated this regression from refinement to the primitive (though unlike the novel, the film desists from depicting the reality of the lavatorial arrangements), the film visually prepares us for the ultimate nadir: trench warfare and the battlefield.

Those battle scenes

In my post on Wings, I mused over the apparently trivialised depiction of trench warfare as compared with the brilliantly filmed dogfights. All Quiet however, is the blueprint for ground battle scenes on which countless war films have been based.

Just as Wings ingeniously filmed from the pilot’s view as well we filming the pilot up close, the masterstroke of All Quiet is to film from the angle of the trenches themselves. The camera peers over the top at no man’s land, waiting for battle to commence, then pans across the row of soldiers with guns nervously waiting to fire.

The brilliance with which the action of the first battle is built up is matched only by the cleverness of the camerawork. The first shells go off, and the battle scene builds up: explosions in the mud, craters forming, gunfire. Then men are seen running from the horizon towards the trench, and the enemy has a human face. The camera pans out to reveal the hundreds of men on the ground, running, and then back in to show them falling, or running through water-filled craters or jumping over corpses. Meanwhile the Germans are firing, and in one of the most memorable sequences in the film, the camera is seemingly attached to a machine gun. As it sweeps from left to right, we see the barrel’s eye view of man after man being hit and falling down in clouds of dust and tangles of barbed wire. The scene is chilling: in mimicking the movement of the machine gun, the camera depicts the machine’s ruthless efficiency and relentless, robotic drive. I found myself riveted, mouth gaping stupidly, lips curling up in horror.

Chaos reigns as the enemy’s men get ever closer to the trench and every soldier must use anything at his disposal to survive. In one moment, a soldier is holding onto the barbed wire fence in front of the trench; the next, only his hands are left.

One of the film’s – and novel’s – most famous vignettes

Soon the enemy is rushing towards the trench with bayonets outstretched and jumping in, where in that confined space men stab each other, shoot each other and hit each other with spades – much as they hit the rats – to end the battle.

A terrible, terrible scene – but one area in which the film has greater impact than the novel. Powerful as the book is, I am not a military expert, and when I read lines like “Three guns fire out just beside us. The gunflash shoots away diagonally into the mist, the artillery roars and rumbles” (page 37, Vintage edition 1996), I find it quite difficult to imagine what that actually looks and sounds like (“curtain fire” also features – what on earth is that?). I may not be able to tell the difference between ‘artillery’ and ‘a coal-box shell’, but the experience is nevertheless brought to me on film in a way it cannot be in the book.

These boots were made for telling a poignant tale, economically on film

A beautiful example of how the film really exploits its medium is in the story of Kemmerich’s boots. In an early scene at the training academy, when the boys are all still brimming with juvenile enthusiasm, Kemmerich brags about his fine boots, which his uncle gave him. When Kemmerich is in the field hospital, having just had a leg amputated, the existence of his fine boots which he can no longer wear is central to his emotional and physical decline. When he dies, Müller ‘inherits’ the boots and the next shot is a close-up of the boots marching, before panning out to a pleased-looking Müller who is quickly killed. A random soldier, not one of our boys, is then shown happily wearing the prized boots, which we infer he has pulled off Müller’s corpse. Another close-up: the bottom of a ladder in a trench. We see the boots climb up the ladder out of shot. The camera doesn’t move. Nothing happens for a moment – we are still looking at the bottom of the ladder. Then we see the boots fall lifelessly down to the ground.

Action versus horror

If Wings owes much to the action genre, depicting something of a boys own adventure version of war, some elements of All Quiet have more in common with horror. The visual descent into darkness, and vignettes like the hands on the wire (taken directly from the novel) are two examples of an almost gothic sensibility apparent in the film.

In one scene, the soldiers are under attack in a country churchyard. As Paul dives for cover, he gratefully grabs a large timber box for cover, before recoiling in horror and shoving the timber away as he realises it is a coffin and he has unwittingly sheltered in a grave.

In fact, this is another sanitised version of an account in the novel, in which it is a military cemetery under attack and Paul and his comrades are grateful for the shelter the corpses and coffins provide (“They have been killed for a second time. But every corpse that was shattered saved the life of one of us” – page 49, Ibid). Presumably, audiences were deemed not quite ready for this.

The soldiers

Paul Bäumer – the central character

Lew Ayres is well cast as Bäumer: good looking enough to be a leading man, but not so striking as not plausibly to be an everyman. His delicate features lend themselves to the role of a would-be poet, and he acquits himself well, if not effortlessly, in what is a challenging role. He is perhaps a little smooth for my taste though, and around half way through I realised that something had been bugging me about him: in looks, demeanour and intonation, he reminded me so strongly of Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell, that I even wondered whether Vincent Kartheiser had based the character on Ayres’ interpretation of Bäumer:

“The Kaiser is a product. Don’t forget that”

“You still think it’s beautiful to dye for one’s country. The first box of Just For Men taught us better”

Katczinsky – the avuncular older friend

Louis Wolheim is wonderful as father-figure Kat: charismatic and likeable, his good-humoured yet authoritative presence on screen is as reassuring as a declaration of peace.

The rest of the cast are all excellent, but it’s difficult perhaps to understand how a contemporary audience would have appreciated them. For example, the vaguely comic character Tjaden is played by Slim Summerville, a well-known comedy actor at the time. My guess is this would have created more light relief than Tjaden really creates in the film or novel – kind of like Sacha Baron Cohen in Les Miserables. In another famous scene, again taken from the novel, Paul must spend a day and a night sheltering in a crater with the body of a man he has just killed. Paul at first watches the man dies a slow, gurgling death, before becoming hysterical and talking to the corpse. Raymond Griffith is uncredited as the dead French soldier Gérard Duval, but was apparently also a well-known comic actor at the time. How would this have affected an audience’s experience of that scene? Brought home the death of a real person more forcefully – or undermined it?

An evolutionary crossroads

All Quiet on the Western Front is particularly interesting from an Oscar Best Picture evolutionary perspective. It looks clearly to the future – dialogue and sound effects have been mastered, cinematography continues to innovate, challenging subject matter is tackled. According to the blurb accompanying my Blu-Ray disc, Lewis Milestone started his career as an assistant film cutter, and it shows. The confidence with which he directs the battle scenes easily rivals Wellman’s confidence in the air.

However, it also cleaves firmly to the past, to the action tradition exemplified by Wings. Whilst the dialogue may seem practically fly-on-the-wall naturalistic when compared with the awkward clunkiness of The Broadway Melody, it retains a staged quality that still calls to mind the theatre again. A limitation of production at the time is the lack of a soundtrack; this has served the film well – the silence before the battle breaks out creates more anticipation than any mood music could. However, what the film is crying out for, but was presumably unable to produce, is a voice-over narrative.

Instead, some of Paul’s existentialist musings become soliloquies in the film. A speech or two is fine, but there are one or two too many, either to seem realistic (would these soldiers really speak to each other of such things?) or naturalistic. Again, it’s a style that would make more sense on stage.

Why no gas?

If you’ve read any poetry of the era, you will be familiar with the vividly depicted gas attacks. I was surprised therefore that not a single gas attack features in the film, and was curious to see whether the same would be true of the book. It isn’t: there is one standout scene in particular involving a gas attack on the battlefield. Curiouser and curiouser – it seems like it would be relatively easy to film someone ‘flound’ring like a man in fire or lime’. However, reading this chapter it also dawned on me why gas had been edited out of the screenplay. If everyone is wearing a mask and uniform, how could the audience tell one character from another? One way would be to have a voice-over (not possible). Another now-familiar trope would be to have a camera ‘inside’ a mask, looking out from one soldier’s viewpoint. Perhaps Milestone didn’t think of this; perhaps he did but couldn’t make it work. Without being able to hear breathing inside the mask, what would it really add anyway?

Whatever the reason, this rather glaring omission in the adaptation serves as a reminder that All Quiet on the Western Front may represent progress and set a new standard for the Oscar Best Picture – but there is more, so much more, for film-makers to learn.

What an exciting juncture in our Oscar Best Picture journey. Looking forward to our next film, Cimarron.

]]>https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/3-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-the-talkies-fight-back/feed/3catnippingAll Quiet on the Western FrontAll Quiet on the Western FrontAll Quiet on the Western FrontAll Quiet on the Western Front opening sceneAll Quiet on the western front classroomAll Quiet on the Western Front windowAll Quiet on the Western Front doorwayAll Quiet on the Western Front dugout bunkerAll Quiet on the Western Front - hands on fenceVincent Kartheiser looks like Lew AyresVincent Kartheiser looks like Lew AyresLouis Wolheim Katczinsky2. The Broadway Melody – A-One Step Forward and A-Two Steps Backhttps://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/the-broadway-melody-a-one-step-forward-and-a-two-steps-back/
https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/the-broadway-melody-a-one-step-forward-and-a-two-steps-back/#commentsSun, 10 Nov 2013 20:44:56 +0000http://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/?p=13]]>

Written by: Norman Houston and James Gleason, from a story by Edmund Goulding

Songs: Nacio Herb Brown (music), Arthur Freed (lyrics)

Choreography: George Cunningham

Starring: Bessie Love, Anita Page, Charles King

The Broadway Melody was the second ever film to win the Oscar for Best Picture for 1928/1929 (eligibility was over a two year period initially), and in one obvious way already represents a leap forward: Talking! Singing! Unlike Wings, it has sound.

On the other hand, The Broadway Melody was the first ever movie musical, so in some ways it feels like the evolutionary clock has been reset to zero.

Hooray for Hollywood! I approach the film with ridiculous amounts of excitement!

I may have recorded some ambivalence ahead of watching Wings, but I approach The Broadway Melody with an enthusiasm bordering on fervour: I love Hollywood musicals! And though I adore many of the lavish technicolor productions of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, the silvery productions of the Thirties have an elegant brand of magic that’s all their own. I cut my classic movie-loving teeth getting up at 7am in the school holidays to watch Fred and Ginger season on BBC2, and I’ve never quite lost my fascination with the era.

People just don’t do The Continental enough any more

(Why is it that any old movies that are any good get shown at such odd times of day? But channel hop of a rainy Saturday afternoon, and your choice of any black and white movies will be limited to a dreary melodrama – usually with a blandly portentous title such Innocent Lives, or The Lady of the Hall, or From the Mouths of Babes – or a bleached out western, and the western is almost never Destry Rides Again. This is how you end up watching a triple bill of Don’t Tell the Bride followed by Countryfile. If any programmers happen to be reading this, answers in the comments please!).

Not that I’m expecting The Broadway Melody to be as good as Swing Time, Top Hat, or (my personal favourite) The Gay Divorcée. I’m just intrigued to see the first Hollywood musical. I’m definitely anticipating something with an unpolished air of experimentation: my prediction is that the story will be weak and the direction lacking imagination. I’ve never heard of any of the actors and I reckon the acting will be reasonably poor. But I can’t wait to see what the original prototype looks like!

What excites me most, though, is the songs. I have no idea which ones are featured in the film, but I know it was common to recycle songs in stage and film musicals, and I’m convinced there’ll be a few classics in there.

I watch the film – and am taken by surprise…

Well, for the second time in a row my expectations were confounded. Only this time, everything that I thought would be fabulous, is bad; and everything that I thought would be dreadful is not so bad after all.

From dogfights to catfights

The Swiss cheese of a plot is as simplistic as I expected, but a brutal dose of reality runs through it of the kind not generally associated with Hollywood musicals. Like Wings, it features a love triangle storyline, but unlike Wings there is no fourth character to set up an obvious resolution. The theatrical setting cannot have the same weight as the First World War, but it does provide scope for a wider range of characters, particularly female ones. If Wings is “man’s film” (according to Clara Bow), rounded female characters are given centre stage in The Broadway Melody. There are no airborne battles, but the lead women must fight for their places in the show and in their lives.

As anticipated, there is no getting away from the lack of direction – both artistically and technically – and poor cinematography. However, many a movie musical that is weak of plot and clunky of camerawork has been redeemed with a corker of a soundtrack. Unfortunately, The Broadway Melody is not one of them.

The songs are neither meaningful enough to move the story on, nor catchy enough to be enjoyed for their own sake. I found myself wishing it had been filmed as a straight drama rather than a musical, because the songs distract from other aspects of the film which are worth watching for. At its worst, The Broadway Melody is a hacky and amateurish backstage musical with forgettable songs; At its best, it is a bittersweet and compelling portrayal of sisterly love, set against a surprisingly dark – and at times disturbing – theatrical backdrop.

The plot

The two Mahoney sisters arrive in New York with the hope of turning their vaudeville ‘sister act’ into something big and seeing their name in lights. Hank (played by Love) is the feisty and protective older girl, and Queenie (Page) her younger, more cautious sibling.

Hank’s sweetheart Eddie Kearns (King) is already in the Big Apple. He has just sold his song The Broadway Melody to Francis Zanfield, the theatre impresario, and will be performing it at Zanfield’s revue. Through this connection he gets the sisters an audition with Mr Zanfield to be in the same show.

When the sisters audition, Mr Zanfield selects Queenie but rejects Hank. However, Queenie secretly persuades him to take Hank too, and he agrees to spare Hank’s feelings by not revealing that he did not choose her outright.

Will the sisters make it on Broadway? Will Hank prove Mr Zanfield wrong? And will Eddie stay true to Hank now that he has met her beautiful younger sister?

Talking Singing Dancing!

Yes: but – all at the same time?

The Broadway Melody opens with an aerial view of Manhattan, the camera panning the skyscrapers while the film’s main theme segues promisingly into the old classic, Give My Regards to Broadway. Then the camera swoops down to Scene 1: a music publisher’s office.

Remember me to Herald Square!

The camera initially cuts between various musicians and performers practising their new material, but then lets them continue simultaneously while Eddie shouts a line of dialogue with another character, over the din. I found the cacophony almost unbearable, and it was a relief when Eddie gets everyone to hush so that he can introduce his song, The Broadway Melody.

After he’s sung it, Eddie makes an oh-so knowing reference to Give My Regards to Broadway‘s composer George M Cohan: “If you want a song, see Georgie Cohan. He writes good music too!”

Oh, Eddie. Such a wag! It’s not the only occasion where I was cruelly tantalised by references to the era’s fabled songwriters – “We know…Gershwin and Irving Berlin” the sisters trill during their duet, before dashing my hopes lower than the chorus girls’ necklines.

This was the golden age of American song-writing. Gershwin and Irving Berlin are just two of many Tin Pan Alley alumni that could have been mentioned: Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, Dorothy Fields and Oscar Hammerstein II, Harry Warren…In the Twenties and Thirties, these great artists were prolific in producing ever more beautiful and inventive songs about love, life and New York City.

Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, by contrast, seem to have had a painting-by-numbers approach to song-writing. The music is derivative and unadventurous, but Freed in particular (whatever the great heights he would later scale as a movie musical producer) suffers from terminal triteness. The title song, The Broadway Melody, is a case in point:

“Don’t bring a frown to old Broadway/You’ve got to clown on Broadway…” Apparently, Broadway is basically your 6th birthday party.

“A million lights they flicker there/A million hearts beat quicker there…” Perhaps he should have added, “Epileptics should take extra care!”

“No skies are grey on the Great White Way/That’s the Broadway Melody…” The ‘melody’ isn’t even a sound, it’s just a tired metaphor for feeling happy that clashes with the image of electric street lights.

Brown and Freed have taken some of the swagger ofGive My Regards to Broadway (1904), the romantic possibility ofManhattan (1925), and the notion from both of referencing New York and its landmarks; but with none of the insight, wit or originality of either. While GMRTB is a role-call of favourite haunts, and Manhattan an ironic tribute to the city’s low-lights, The Broadway Melody says absolutely nothing about either the place’s unique atmosphere or the modern urban experience, and bears no relevance whatsoever to anything in the film’s story. Lullaby of Broadway (1935) is another famous number that does a wonderful job of making Broadway both the setting and the song, cleverly making music out of the literal noise of the city (“The rumble of the subway train/the rattle of the taxis”), and that’s what I really missed here.

Sadly however, this inane ditty is probably the soundtrack’s highlight. If the sisters’ duet, “We’re two harmony babies, from Melody Lane” doesn’t have you vomiting into your cloche hat, the main love song, “You were meant for me/I was meant for you” certainly will.

At the time it was a huge hit, in that inexplicable way that banal and bathetic love songs often are, and was most famously featured in Brown and Freed’s best-known work, the peerless Singin’ in the Rain. The screenplay was written around their songs, including You Were Meant For Me and The Broadway Melody. (The latter is the centre piece of the movie musical that Kelly’s character pitches to the studio.) Gene Kelly sings You Were Meant For Me to Debbie Reynolds in a scene which brilliantly layers cliché upon cliché, virtually “de-clichéing” the song through metadrama: Kelly’s character says he can’t find the right words to express his feelings without the proper setting, and leads Reynolds onto a film set before switching on lights and a wind machine for romantic effect. It’s the perfect deliberately phoney setting for lines like “I’m content/The angels must have sent you”, and the lush orchestration matches the backdrop.

“Could you take a look at the guttering while you’re up there?”

But sung by Eddie without any warning to Queenie in her apartment, it’s just a bad chat-up line.

“Get your coat love, you’ve pulled”

Without the ballast of Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s wonderful script and story, the songs are exposed in all their weakness.

(Also, Gene Kelly could sing Baa Baa Black Sheep and make you fall in love with him).

Production – Acorn Antiques style

After the photographic innovations in Wings, The Broadway Melody is striking in its lack of invention. Entire scenes appear to be shot in one take, from the same camera: apart from the occasional close-up, and some terrible messy editing, there is little to distinguish the film from a recording of a stage play. I don’t just mean the scenes that are set on stage – the Zanfield Revue productions – but all of them. In several scenes, each shot is a couple of seconds too long, so that the actors seem to lose pace and trail off in a self-conscious improvisation. There’s an impromptu dance number with the three main characters, and Anita Page has her back to the camera for the whole routine.

The choreography in the Revue numbers is as good as you’d expect from routines most probably lifted from the Ziegfeld Follies themselves. However, it achieves no more than the kind of choreography achievable on stage. You can see that it wouldn’t be a very big step to move from these to the kind of dance routines that Busby Berkeley would devise which exploited the medium so well, and it’s a step you wish they’d taken.

The amateurish feel is not enhanced by the intertitles, which pop up before each new setting to explain where the action is taking place, in the manner of Law and Order. They are wholly unnecessary and cut right into the action. Even worse, some of them are actually wobbly, as if the card is being held up by a shaky pair of hands. I know that a silent version of the film was released (for those cinemas that did not yet have the talkie equipment) – maybe the titles stem from that? Or maybe the film-makers were still experimenting with the transition from silent to talkie (any answers in the comments please!). Whatever the reason, they don’t help.

Having had these impressions, I was tickled to find this review from 1929, in which a Guardian journalist lambasts the Talkies generally. The reviewer complains of the “inability of writers, directors and actors to adjust themselves to the new technique. Their first response has been to reproduce stage drama word for word and gesture for gesture. It ought to be obvious that this is not the final function of the talking screen. The stage is what it is because it has limitations which it cannot transcend…For the dialog film to discard all the natural advantages in technique which the cinema has acquired in a quarter of a century would be absurd.”

(Quoted from the Manchester Guardian in The Literary Digest for July 13, 1929, ‘A British Jab at our “Talkies”‘).

Another dodgy DVD

Although The Broadway Melody is not mentioned explicitly, the reviewer may well have had it in mind!

In contrast to the fancy Blu-ray version of Wings that was released, the DVD of The Broadway Melody that I ordered from Amazon is a pretty low quality import from Korea, with some of the singing and dialogue barely audible. I don’t know if this is the DVD release itself or the original movie – the infamous scene from Singin’ in the Rain where Lina Lamont keeps going out of range of the microphone springs to mind!

According to Wikipedia, the original film featured a two-colour Technicolor sequence, in red and green; however “no known colour prints survive”. I’m not really sorry about this, because – red and green? And I suppose they might turn up in Nigeria one day.

The Mahoney Sisters – worth watching for

So there is much that is wrong with this film, which technically has regressed quite considerably from the achievements in Wings. But that’s not to say I don’t think it is worth watching. If the focus of Wings is the “bromance” between two brothers-in-arms, I find it rather pleasing that The Broadway Melody majors on a sisterly relationship.

Soon after introducing his song on Tin Pan Alley, Eddie has to dash off to meet Hank and Queenie, who have just arrived in town. Charles King may have been given top billing, but these two women drive the story and the pace doesn’t pick up until they arrive on screen.

We quickly learn that the girls have enjoyed comparative success touring the provinces with their vaudeville act, but they are poor and their living standards low. Energetic Hank is brimming with optimism and Big Ideas, certain that with Eddie’s help they can finally make it big; she reassures and cajoles Queenie, who is timid and not convinced that coming to New York was wise. We also learn that Hank has been putting off Eddie’s marriage proposals out of compassion for Queenie, believing her priority should be to take care of her younger sister.

The irony is that it is in fact Queenie who spends most of the film protecting her older sister Hank, first from finding out that Zanfield only wanted Queenie and not Hank, and then from finding out that Eddie is in love with Queenie and not Hank.Both sisters act with the noblest of intentions, each in her own way sacrificing herself for the other, until the climax when the truth must prevail. As The Coral Island is to Lord of the Flies, so The Broadway Melody is to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Although rather heavy-handed, for me their relationship is the only aspect of the film with any real substance. The relationship between Eddie and Queenie doesn’t satisfy, because hardly anything in Eddie’s behaviour makes you believe his intentions are any purer than those of his wealthy rival for Queenie’s affections, Jacques Warriner (reputedly a thinly veiled reference to the real life Jack Warner). “Thanks for being so nice to me,” Queenie says to Warriner after he has presented her with an enormous birthday bouquet. Had Eddie been wealthy and not attached to Queenie’s sister, I couldn’t help but think he would have been just as likely to give Warriner’s slimy response, “Not half so nice as I’d like to be.”

The feisty one vs the pretty one

While Bessie Love is petite and fine-featured, Anita Page is tall, wide-eyed and sultry; blowsily gorgeous with bad posture and the sort of scruffy blonde bob that, unfortunately, is somewhat Myra Hindley-adjacent to modern eyes (The more I look at photos of it, the more I just want to run a comb through it – although it’s not as bad as Clara Bow’s hideous bob in Wings). Page was the big sex symbol of the day, so an obvious casting choice as the sister that would turn Eddie’s head. However, while this is believable enough, for most of the film their relationship seems to consist either of them both concealing their feelings from Hank so well that they appear not to exist, or of Eddie cracking onto Queenie while she makes a big show of resisting out of love for Hank.

Much of the action in the second part of the film centres around Queenie’s attempts to distract herself from Eddie by accepting Warriner’s smarmy overtures (smovertures?). However, Anita Page can’t act, and her battle with her feelings for Eddie and faked rebellion against Hank’s disapproval of Warriner, come off as hammy and ludicrous. It is Hank who is the real heart of the film.

Bessie Love had been a successful silent actress, making her debut during the First World War after having started her career as a Ziegfeld Follies girl (which explains why unlike Page, she did all her own dancing in the film). She was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Hank (she lost out to Mary Pickford in Coquette), proving that not all silent movie stars struggled to adapt to the new medium. I was so impressed by her performance, I sincerely wonder why I had never heard of her before. She was marvellous!

As “the little clucky one” (as Zanfield describes her), in the first half of the film she mixes a breathless optimism with fiery ambition, determined to make it for herself and her sister. In the second half of the film, she mostly Worried About Queenie, while coming to terms with the fact that the sisters’ Broadway career is not going quite to plan.

“It’s alright dear, we’ll find your hairbrush eventually”

As character arcs go, it is not subtle; but then Love can only work with what she’s given.

This might just be the best photo ever

The contrast between Hank at the start of the film and Hank at the very end is a poignant one. I had the feeling I was supposed to care a lot more about Queenie than I actually did, but Queenie’s character development from shy young girl to lovebird seems to be via a series of teenage temper tantrums. Love had me rooting for Hank from start to finish.

Showbiz red in tooth and kell-aw

“Zanfield” is a barely-disguised reference to Ziegfeld, the impresario of Ziegfeld Follies fame, and the shows at the Zanfield Revue are as opulent as the real-life Ziegfeld shows reputedly were. After the wartime austerity of Wings, I enjoyed the ravishing costumes and decadent sets; I loved this fabulous art deco set for example, which lends itself so well to black and white:

The film was criticised at the time for relying on tired clichés to depict the theatrical world, but I was still surprised at quite how unflattering the portrayal is. There are the usual petty jealousies: A bitchy chorus girl sabotages the girls’ audition; catfights break out in the chorus. The stage hands are gruff and impatient, viewing the performers as hindrances to their work. When the effete costume designer complains that the chorus girls are damaging their hats squeezing through the doorway, he is instantly scolded by the matronly wardrobe mistress as she towers over him.

“I told you [the hats] were too high and too wide!”

“Well big woman, I design the costumes for the show, not the doors for the theatre!”

“I know that! If you had, they’d have been done in lavender.”

Miaow! (As an aside, let us note that it is the second Best Picture winner in a row to depict homosexuality in the background). By the time the chorus girls are called to the stage, the frankly terrifying wardrobe mistress is in full Miss Trunchbull mode, actually smacking the girls bottoms to hurry them along. Once on stage, the hitherto affable Eddie morphs into a petulant leading man. “Did you hear that, Mr Zanfield? They trying to drown me out!” he brays, shaking his cane at the conductor. “Are you trying to drown him out?” enquires Zanfield of the conductor, who retorts, “We’re doing our best!”

But beneath these stereotypes is a more disturbing undercurrent.

During a dress rehearsal featuring a tableau vivant of “The Love Boat”(think Windmill Theatre but with marginally more clothes), the chorus girl whose role is to stand stock still on top of the ship’s prow, faints and falls off. She may die of her injuries for all we are ever told; the focus in the movie immediately shifts to who will replace her. Queenie is grabbed, both metaphorically and literally: a stage hand immediately starts pulling her clothes off despite her protests, to get her changed into the scanty ship’s prow outfit. She wants neither the role (a step down from the song and dance act in the sisters’ eyes) nor the man-handling. “But I’ve never taken my clothes off in my life before!” she wails, distraught; but she is pushed into doing it anyway, while the Mahoney sister act is cut.

Francis Zanfield is respectfully depicted as an avuncular business man, rather than the predatory creep that Florenz Ziegfeld obviously was. But that aside, the film does not sugar-coat the sordid reality that the girls in the show are exploited, and irrespective of hard work and talent, are effectively at the mercy of the libido of the theatre’s rich patrons. I realise this is not news, but I was surprised at how open the film was in depicting said libido. I was even more surprised that the main female characters are visibly uncomfortable with the exploitation, and even try to rebel against it (given that sexism was presumably taken for granted in 1929).

Queenie’s feelings at the point she is hustled out of her clothes are not fully explored; the next thing you know, she is up on stage, beaming away as the Lady of the Boat while Eddie, and Zanfield’s rich crony Warriner look on admiringly. The sister act is in tatters, and Hank is made to look horribly naive. Meanwhile, Queenie is an instant hit and despite her initial misgivings, enjoys her sudden success.

The respective reactions of Eddie and Hank illustrate the sexual politics perfectly:

Eddie: [laughs as Hank looks tearful] Oh, now run along and change. I’ll get Queenie. Attagirl!

An evolutionary microcosm of entertainment

This film is clearly flawed both as a movie and a musical, and a dance to The Broadway Melody would probably go, A-one step forward and A-two steps back… But besides the exploration of the Mahoneys’ relationship and the standout performance from Bessie Love, The Broadway Melody captures a fascinating collision of popular entertainment forms from past, present and future in a way that would never be repeated – except self-consciously in Singin’ in the Rain. The waning vaudeville tradition, typified by the sister act and given prominence by the casting of vaudevillian Charles King, meets the comparatively short-lived Ziegfeld Follies, which themselves grew in part out of vaudeville. Both forms meet the recent stage musical, meets the Hollywood talkie and the future of entertainment…that’s The Broadway Melody.

]]>https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/the-broadway-melody-a-one-step-forward-and-a-two-steps-back/feed/2catnippingBroadway MelodyThe Gay DivorcéeThe Broadway Melody - openingEddie Broadway MelodyKelly and ReynoldsAnita Page and Charles KingLove and Page, The Broadway MelodyTBM love triangleBessie Love and Anita PageThis might just be the best photo everThe Broadway MelodyScreening Report: THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927) at Nitehawk Cinemahttps://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/screening-report-the-cat-and-the-canary-1927-at-nitehawk-cinema/
https://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/screening-report-the-cat-and-the-canary-1927-at-nitehawk-cinema/#respondTue, 29 Oct 2013 08:53:27 +0000http://oscarevolution.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/screening-report-the-cat-and-the-canary-1927-at-nitehawk-cinema/cinematically insane: There were no electric guitars or digital loop stations in the 1920s. But that didn’t stop musicians Clifton Hyde and Zach Eichenhorn from using them to accompany a 1927 horror film at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn yesterday. “I have no problem with purists, I’m just not one,” Hyde said after…]]>

Following my thoughts on the two different soundtracks for Wings, this is a completely different take on a silent movie soundtrack – love the idea of it!

There were no electric guitars or digital loop stations in the 1920s. But that didn’t stop musicians Clifton Hyde and Zach Eichenhorn from using them to accompany a 1927 horror film at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn yesterday.

“I have no problem with purists, I’m just not one,” Hyde said after a screening of Paul Leni’s THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927) at the Williamsburg “cinema eatery,” part of Nitehawk’s Vamps and Virgins series of silent films. “It’s important for me, when I arrange all of these, not to do the typical thing.”

Hyde and Eichenhorn’s accompaniment was anything but typical. But the soundscapes they created were an exhilarating compliment to Leni’s Expressionistic “old dark house” classic, starring Laura La Plante as the beautiful heir to a dead lunatic’s fortune. From a subtle recreation of the sputter of the Universal Pictures plane logo, to a sassy bluegrass riff as a man…

My journey begins with Wings, which won the first ever Best Picture Oscar for 1927/1928 (initially, film eligibility was over a two-year period) and was nothing at all like I expected. The subject of this post is my expectations about the movie, and my review…it is personal opinion. If anyone can shed any light on any particular technical or historical aspect, please jump in, in the comments! Similarly if you’ve seen this film too, please share your thoughts with me.

I hope you enjoy!

I approach the film with mixed feelings

I approached this film with a mixture of curiosity, trepidation and an embarrassing amount of prejudice: I’m ashamed to say that although I consider myself a lover of old black and white movies, I’d never watched a completely silent movie all the way through before (even The Artist has a few spoken words at the end). I’d seen the odd snatch of Charlie Chaplin; the Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin; bits of a film called The Wind that I remember my mum watching one afternoon when I was a child (the TV screen looked brown and one of the intertitles said Government’s payin’ three dollars… “That was a lot of money in those days”, my mum had to explain). But my preconceptions were based primarily on silent film as lampooned in Singin’ in the Rain; and that sketch-show favourite, a dastardly villain tying a damsel in distress to the tracks while a Wurlitzer goes into overdrive. I felt there had to be a reason productions like Sunset Boulevard and Mack and Mabel depicted silent movie stars as relics, no longer relevant. I was prepared to accept that certain silent films might be extremely good; but in the limited sense they were good ‘for a silent film’ or ‘for the time’. I feared Wings might be so pantomime, so steeped in Victorian melodrama, so dated in short, as to be borderline unwatchable.

On the other hand, my apprehension was tantalisingly laced with the sort of fascination that only Old Hollywood can induce. I mean, there has to be a reason productions like Sunset Boulevard and Mack and Mabel so hauntingly portray the bittersweet juxtaposition between the new, and a nostalgically remembered golden age…

Regarding the subject-matter – the First World War – I was unsure what to expect. Wings might be a powerful, Hemingway-esque tale of human tragedy, or it might just be turgidly patriotic. Given the film was released on the 10th anniversary of America’s entrance to WW1, and was an immediate hit with the public, I was inclined to suspect the latter.

I watch the wrong version, como una idiota

In 2012, to mark the 85th anniversary of its release, Wings was digitally restored and released on Blu-ray with a new recording of the original orchestral score by J.S. Zamecnik.

So it beats me how I ended up ordering a crappy DVD copy on Amazon, imported from Spain (it is entitled Alas and comes in a double set with Los Angeles Del Infierno – Spanish subtitles optional).

Aie aie aie

I watched it one afternoon and had written half this post before I twigged, following my online rambles, that the Blu-ray version existed. I had clearly not been watching a restored version: some of the intertitles were barely readable and there were certainly no colour-tinted explosions or gunfire sound effects, as advertised. The clincher was the soundtrack: a single pipe organ (the dreaded Wurlitzer!) instead of an orchestra. Where the hell had that come from if the original film was fully scored? For all I knew, the Spanish distributor had added it themselves, perhaps on the assumption that all silent films had to be mandatorily accompanied by manic organ. I hurriedly ordered the Blu-ray disc from Amazon.

The 85th Anniversary Blu-ray release

And here’s the thing: I’ve now seen the film twice, with different soundtracks and substantial quality differences, and now I’m not quite sure of some of the things I initially thought when I first watched it, of which more later. I did learn, thanks to the Blu-ray disc menu, that the Wurlitzer soundtrack was composed and performed by someone called Gaylord Carter (you are given the choice of soundtracks). It transpires (thank you, Wikipedia) that Carter was a cinema organist who later made a career out of writing silent movie soundtracks for release of the films on video. So it is likely that the music to the first version I watched was composed in the Seventies. Which is annoying, because I was all set to go to town on the organ music, its oom-pa military march style, and what that said about the film, the period and the attitude to war, and…oh well! You’ve been spared that at least!

I finally get to the film – and eat my words!

Well, I am a moron and none (or hardly any) of my blinkered notions about the film, and silent film in general, were borne out. Wings is good, and the more I think about it, the more it dawns on me just how good it is. Sure it’s flawed – but overall it’s the sort of good that sends shivers down your spine.

The plot

It is 1917 in small-town America. Jack Powell (Rogers) is a carefree young man tinkering with his car and day-dreaming about flying planes. Mary Preston (Bow) is the tomboyish girl next door with a huge crush on him. However, Jack sees her as an irritating kid whom he tolerates out of old affection. Instead, he pursues the beautiful and refined Sylvia Lewis (played by Jobyna Ralston), blind to the fact that Sylvia is in love with David Armstrong (Arlen), whose family is the richest in town.

Jack and David enlist in the air force at the same time and despite disliking each other initially, soon become best friends. Will they make it back from the war? Will Jack find out Sylvia’s true feelings for David – and if so will his friendship with David survive? Will little Mary succeed in winning Jack over?

Take my breath away…

For all its depiction of war and the love triangle back-story, Wings is essentially a buddy movie about two ace fighter pilots who, when not featuring in breath-taking flying sequences, roister about at flight training school and enjoy complicated love lives…

Wings opens with these titles:

On June 12, 1927, In Washington, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh paid simple tribute to those who fell in the War.

“In that time,” he said, “feats were performed and deeds accomplished which were far greater than any peace accomplishments of aviation.”

To those young warriors of the sky, whose wings are folded about them forever, this picture is reverently dedicated.

The Star-Spangled Banner plays in the background, helping set a tone of patriotic heroism, and the whole opening neatly exploits the public’s then Lindbergh-inspired fascination with flying (Lindbergh had recently crossed the Atlantic solo). Our expectation is that we might be about to witness some aviation-based feats of derring-do, while the dedication offers a poignant note of remembrance.

(At least, the Star-Spangled Banner is what you get in the restored version. In the pipe organ version, you get a very plonky and relentless upbeat marching band tune, as if the composer has grasped the meaning of ‘warriors of the sky’ but failed to understand what ‘wings folded about them forever’ might be hinting at metaphorically – the introduction of an eschatological conceit that will make various reappearances through the film.)

Youth, war, patriotism and poignancy…not a bad summary of the movie’s main themes.

The characters

Clara Bow – Clara Wow!

I’d heard of Clara Bow, the original Hollywood “It” girl, although I hadn’t seen any of her films. The character of Mary wasn’t even in the original story, but was shoe-horned in so the biggest star of the time could feature. This explains why certain aspects of Mary’s story and character development (particularly her military antics) are somewhat unsatisfying, and the actress herself didn’t care for the part – “[Wings is] a man’s picture and I’m just the whipped cream on top of the pie” (Dawn Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, Blood Moon Productions, 2010. p. 147 via Wikipedia).

But sometimes, a pie might be very well made, but a bit of whipped cream on top transforms it from ‘tasty’ to ‘delectable’.

If you haven’t seen any of Bow’s films, hasten to your online purveyor of choice and order one as fast as your mouse can click ‘Buy’.

Within seconds of Bow appearing on screen, it becomes clear something extraordinary is happening. She has so much screen magnetism, you’re practically catapulted towards her image. The range and nuance of emotions that she expresses through her face alone is quite remarkable. When I watched it again on Blu-ray, her entrance on screen seemed a bit too mime-like, more so than I remembered the first time. She enters via a washing line, and is soon being a nuisance Jack as he works on his car, crawling underneath to have a chat with him. It does a great job of setting Mary up as the earthy and fun girl next door, but her actions and expressions seem over-exaggerated.

Open-mouthed smiling: where it all began

However, she does soon warm up and becomes more natural, and her acting is not Victorian melodrama or mere pantomime. It’s the opposite – every dart of the eyes, every miniscule chin movement, tells the story of a character who is recognisable and relatable. Watching her, you can see why she might not have cared for the Talkies, when they came:

“I hate talkies…they’re stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there’s no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me.”

I guess you just don’t need to use your face that much when there’s dialogue telling the story too.

Buddy Rogers – the cute one

Not surprising then, given that he shares the opening scenes with Bow, that I took a while longer to warm up to Rogers. Compared to her, his face seemed hopelessly blank to me. Which is completely unfair, because even the first time I watched it, on the crappy DVD version, I could see that he was perfectly cast as the symbol of all-American youth. His open, teen idol features and easy smile lend themselves perfectly to the exuberant, optimistic role of Jack. In the crappy version, I felt that he just couldn’t quite compete with Bow’s charisma, but that he came into his own sharing the screen with Ralston and Arlen, where his puppy-like boyishness contrasts nicely with their poise and sophistication. In addition, Jack’s Boy’s Own Adventure-style enthusiasm for life, girls and bombing “heinies” – which is only quelled towards the end of the film – began to grate on me after a while.

THEN I watched it on Blu-ray, and realised that I’d fallen in love with Jack from the beginning. Why on earth had I thought Rogers was second fiddle to Clara Bow? Was it the quality of the film, or just the impact of watching first time? He gives a fine, naturalistic performance. You want to sit him down and explain to him sternly what the war really means, before giving him a big hug and a cookie.

Gee I’m excited about the war!

Richard Arlen – the handsome one

One of the only minor criticisms of the film at the time was of Richard Arlen’s acting (or lack thereof). For most of the film however, his portrayal of the more reserved David made an effective contrast to Jack’s excitability – the lack of great acting wasn’t really a problem. I will say though, without giving the plot away, that there is a scene near the end that does call for more – much more – emotional depth than Arlen seems capable of giving, undeniably handsome though he is.

Watching the restored version, Arlen’s resemblance to Suburgatory‘s amiable dunderhead Ryan Shay, that I’d noted the first time as ‘passing’, was markedly more pronounced. Only whereas Ryan is supposed to look vacuously self-satisfied, it is not at all clear that David is.

The “Put on a Hat” method of acting

Jobyna Ralston – the beautiful one

Having introduced the tomboyish Mary, the scene cuts to Sylvia, who we are told ‘had the advantage over the small-town girls. She was a visitor from the city.’

In case we should be in any doubt that she is the opposite of Mary in every way, Sylvia is pictured not just in a white dress and beautiful hair, but sitting on a swing, singing and playing a lute. A LUTE. Ah, trust those city girls!

“When I’m cleaning windows” was her favourite

(Seriously – he’s actually Ryan Shay!)

If the background to this still looks blurry, it’s because in this scene they are on a swing, which is swinging madly back and forth and the camera is swinging with it. I started to feel nauseous two seconds in, and it was a blessed relief when Jack came bounding up to drag her off the swing and into his newly-repaired automobile.

The Gary Cooper Cameo

The two friends have completed ground school training (a section of the film which might be dubbed, ‘prototype of a training montage’) and can barely contain their excitement about actually getting to fly planes for the first time. They meet their cool (in every sense) new tent-mate, Cadet White, played with devastating sang froid by Gary Cooper (this scene-stealing appearance would launch his career). After taking a few bites of a chocolate bar, White says they’ll be seeing a lot of each other and takes his leave, as he’s “Got to go out and do a flock of figure eights before chow.” He throws the half-eaten chocolate bar on the bed, and the camera zooms in on it. Unlike our boys, White doesn’t carry a lucky mascot as “Luck or no luck, when your time comes, you’re going to get it!”

Then the music turns ominous and seconds later, White’s plane crashes and he is dead.

“I know. But it all works out all right in the end when my fame massively eclipses yours”

It’s one of the most memorable moments in the film, and it takes place before Jack and David have even got inside the cockpit of a plane. They appear as stunned as I was. The camera follows Jack’s eyes to White’s bed, with its indentation from his recently sleeping body. Someone comes to the tent and asks them to pack White’s belongings. They do as they’re told, visibly shocked. A photograph of White’s mother is lingered over. Jack realises that in order to pack a pair of socks, he will have to dislodge them from under the half-eaten chocolate bar. The camera zooms in on the bar again, White’s teethmarks apparent. Jack’s obvious reluctance, and the care with which he pulls out the socks from under the chocolate bar, now a symbol of everything White was but in the blink of any eye no longer is, conveys genuine tragedy as economically as anything Hemingway might have produced. Then, moments later, Jack and David are called for their first flight instruction. It’s difficult to conceive of a more dramatic way to set up their first airborne experience.

There’s a touching moment when Jack and David have to transition from their shock over White’s sudden demise and their excitement about flying at last. But for me this is over too quickly, let down a little by the music, which suddenly changes back to the key of ‘everything’s alright again’. I wanted that conflict between their thoughts of White and their schoolboy excitement to come through more. I’ve re-watched this scene with both the Zamecnik and the Carter scores, and the effect is the same in both.

Instead, what we get is some unexpected gallows humour: they arrive at the airfield in time to see the arrival of a van with CRASH TOOLS emblazoned on the side. A mechanic gets outs and leans against the side, dispassionately smoking a cigarette before yawning widely. Jack and David look on with comic unease. But any ambivalence evaporates when they climb into the planes, and we watch them take off enthusiastically.

The flying scenes

Nothing prepared me for quite how good these are. They really are as well-filmed as many aviation scenes shot today – in 1927, they must have been jaw-dropping.

The first time I watched, I sat there trying to work out how certain shots had been done. I thought they must have used miniatures. Or possibly a cockpit was mocked up, and a screen with planes flying in the distance projected behind it? (It was seamlessly done if so, I thought). Or – maybe they used archive military footage?

Wrong, wrong and wrong. Every shot is real, as I subsequently learned. Director “Wild Bill” Wellman – an intriguing character in his own right – had been given the job based on his previous career flying planes during the war, and writer John Monk Saunders, as well as Richard Arlen, had flown too. Buddy Rogers, the youngster of the bunch, learned to fly specifically for the film and reportedly spent 98 hours in the air during filming. When you see him in the cockpit, he really is up there and in some cases controlling the plane. He is reported to have been terrified and to have thrown up after every flight, but is said to have earned Wellman’s respect and affection for gamely going up time and again. The rest of the flying was done by the US military, plus some stunt pilots.

Wellman and his cinematographer, Harry Perry, came up with a way of attaching the cameras to the planes themselves (as opposed to being held by the cameramen), which is how they were able to capture shots that had never been seen before. Audiences in 1927 wouldn’t have seen a pilot in his cockpit before, or how other planes appear when you’re up in the sky. One of the cleverest camera angles is of looking down on bombs being dropped from the plane and watching them fall from above – the precise inversion of the view of bombs with which civilian viewers would have been familiar.

Even so, there were some shots that I was convinced must have been faked. In particular, a plane (filmed from above) is seen going into a tailspin, spiralling towards earth. Again I tried to work out how this had been achieved, only to find out that it was indeed a real live stunt – proof that for as long as there have been aeroplanes, there have been batshit crazy stuntmen.

In Wings: Grandeur in the Sky (a Making Of documentary that comes as a special feature on the Blu-ray edition – love a good Making Of!), Wellman’s son, William Wellman Jr, notes that his father realised that clouds were needed in frame in order to get any visual perspective of the planes in the air, and angered studio bosses by delaying filming to wait for cloudy conditions. I remember a similar storyline in The Aviator, and had thought this cloud business was attributed to Howard Hughes. I believe Hughes admired Wings, and he and Wellman met – did The Aviator get it wrong or did both directors just realise the same thing (as seems possible)? Any answers in the comments!

Depiction of the First World War

As noted, Wellman was hired because of his flying experience. So it’s all the more surprising that he turned out to have a brilliant eye for composition. Every battle shot is a work of art:

Artist’s impression

Almost Dali-esque

One reviewer at the time noted the film made extensive use of Magnascope technology, which if I’ve understood this blog correctly, was a type of widescreen format which, if your local cinema was equipped with the latest kit, meant you viewed a much bigger, wider screen than previously. I believe this contributes to the epic quality of some of the war scenes – if I have not understood correctly though please don’t be shy – explain it to me in the comments!

Wings does not shy away from death and tragedy, but these do not dictate the tone of the film, which is concerned primarily with the heroism and accomplishments of the lead male characters – definitely more Top Gun than Catch-22. Aspects that today we have come to expect as de rigueur in any war movie, such as fear, horror, futility, anger – all that trench-based “unpleasantness” – are not really dwelt upon.

Youth laughed and wept and lived its heedless hour, while over the world hung a cloud which spread and spread until its shadow fell in some degree on every living person.

And Youth answered the challenge-

Here was a door that only the bravest of the brave dared open – a path of glory mounting toward the stars!

So the intertitles tell us after the main characters have been introduced: “war” is an amorphous evil sucking everyone into its path. The film does not question its inevitability any more than it attempts to understand the causes and reasons for the war, or why young American men are heading to Europe as ‘children ardent for some desperate glory’. The point in the film in which Jack and David have been posted to France is introduced with the intertitle, Like a mighty maelstrom of destruction, the war now drew into its center the power and the pride of all the earth. The war is an evil spirit which the brave young Americans must vanquish.

Although the characters refer throughout to the Kaiser, ‘Captain Kellerman’s Flying Circus’, ‘heinies’ and the ‘hated Iron Cross’, it is War which is personified as the real enemy, rather than the Germans, which are portrayed with surprising ambivalence. In one scene at the end of a battle, David is left alone in the air with a German plane on him. His machine-gun jams and death seems certain. “But there was chivalry among these knights of the air”, we are told, and the German shows mercy. Later on in the film, after an incident involving one of our heroes when the Germans believe they have killed him, the Americans receive a polite note from the Germans explaining as much. Ironically, the only real xenophobia depicted in the film is via the buffoonish character of Herman Schwimpf, an unfortunately-named Dutch American who enlists the same time as Jack and David. Every time he receives anti-German abuse on someone learning his name, he strips off to reveal his Stars and Stripes tattoo – whereupon the raised fist becomes a pat on the back. Change ‘Herman Schwimpf’ to ‘Mohammed Hussein’ and it’s a case of plus ça change…

Hatred and fear is transferred to the trappings of war, rather than people. One section of the film follows the launch of the German ‘giant’ Gotha (large battle plane) and ensuing attack, and the plucky efforts of the American pilots to thwart it. Who knows, the unleashing of the Gotha may have inspired Tolkien to Grond, the warhammer in The Lord of the Rings, so sinister does the plane itself seem and so effectively does the film make you see this weapon of war as a terrifying monster. It is referred to as a ‘dragon’ and has even been decorated with an evil-looking dragon, as well as skull and cross bones.

Other aspects of the war are frankly puzzling. During one battle, Jack is forced to make a crash landing in order to escape two Fokkers on his tail. He finds himself in no man’s land, jumping in and out of craters and dodging cannon fire. Luckily for him, “Help comes from a nearby British trench”.

“Hello, Yank. Welcome to a very merry little war!”

“- and now how about a wee drop for the King and Uncle Sam?”

“O.K.!”

Suddenly it’s all gone a bit Blackadder…To a modern viewer however, it’s quite a shocking trivialisation of trench warfare which, though its status as a symbol of the futility of war and “lions led by donkeys” may be questioned, its status as a symbol of mass slaughter may not.

The film does depict multiple casualties and killings, especially later on when there is more focus on the ground war – Wellman himself even makes a cameo appearance as a soldier dying a particularly hammy death on the battlefield. But these are not brought out to the extent of certain later war films. There is one notable moment during the final ‘Big Push’, when the Allied troops are marching on the ground. One soldier is so weary he sits down for a break; one of his comrades gives him a cigarette. Then a shell attack – everyone hits the ground, but our friend is too tired to move and is hit. The cigarette is still in his mouth, still burning. Afterwards, when everyone gets up and it’s time to move on, his comrade calls at him to “snap out of it!” His corpse keels over and the cigarette falls out of his mouth. His fellow soldier looks at him impassively for a moment, and then stubs out the cigarette. That is all. It’s a brutally unsentimental depiction of a fatal bombing.

But in other respects the depiction of the marching troops seems sanitised – it’s certainly a million miles away from ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks…’

All in all, it’s a bewildering mixture of patriotism and naivety, brutality and tragedy.

The Jazz Age

Wings was made during the so-called “Pre-Code Era”, that is the era before the censorship code was fully in force. Pre-Code films are known for featuring all sorts of morally dubious activities, such as women having strong characters and married couples sleeping in the same bed. So I had some hope that there might be some sexual realism in this film.

There is some casual nudity – bare bottoms at the barracks and a glimpse of Clara Bow’s breasts when she’s getting changed. It’s hardly scandalous but compared with the prudery that followed, it’s practically outrageous.

Halfway through, Jack and David have been decorated and are granted some leave as a reward. They immediately head to the bright lights of Paris and cut loose at the Folies Bergères. The camera pans round the room, alighting on a succession of couples sharing tables – one of them is a cross-dressing lesbian couple sharing a tender moment. The camera moves quickly but there is no mistaking it, even in the crappy DVD version. It’s a reminder that in 1927, the Jazz Age was still in full swing. Although set during 1917-18, there is no real effort to place the costumes and hairstyles any earlier than the year the film was made. (Bow in particular sports a simply hideous curly bob throughout – it really is the ugliest bob this side of Julie Andrews’ in The Sound of Music.)

During this scene, Jack gets very drunk on champagne. In a cute bit of photo wizardry, he sees bubbles rising out of his glass.

Bubbles!

Then they’re coming out of the bottle and the end of his finger, while the orchestra plays I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (another minor anachronism, as the song was not released until 1919). It’s all very well, but this bubble business goes on and on. 10 minutes later and the bubbles are still bubbling. He is so drunk he fails to recognise his old friend Mary, but he agrees to go with her on the basis that her sequinned dress reminds him of bubbles. I was surprised at the camera work here – the camera takes on a ‘Jack’s Eye’ view and zooms drunkenly in on the blurry sequins, and then shows Jack’s double vision view of Mary. I know these techniques are hackneyed gimmicks nowadays, but I hadn’t appreciated they go way back to 1927.

In the next scene, in a hotel, Jack is still seeing bubbles. He shakes the bed and makes bubbles come out of the bedpost. I mean come ON! Enough with the bubbles! This blog has a nice array of GIFs showing the various bubble sequences, so you can see the special effects (and Rogers’ amusing drunken turn).

I’m guessing the bubbles were achieved using the same technique as the titles – does anyone know?

I don’t think there is any evidence that the film is suggesting David and Jack might be sexually attracted to each other. However, there are moments in the film which are so sensual it’s impossible to avoid homoerotic overtones. When the men are decorated by a French army officer, the Frenchman kisses them each twice. But these are not the quick cheek pecks we associate with a Gallic bisou, but lingering lip-to-neck actions. Most famously, there is a very emotional scene towards the end that looks a lot more like two passionate lovers than best friends.

Final thoughts

This is an excellent film. My main complaint is that it is too long – there’s only so much battle I can watch before fatigue sets in. Day turned to night as I sat sofa-bound. However, when I watched it again on Blu-ray, it transpires there is an intermission halfway through, which makes sense and helps greatly.

One criticism of the film at the time was that the ending was too sentimental, but I disagree. Jack returns home, sporting some unconvincing grey hair courtesy of a bottle of talc (you know, to show that War Has Affected Him). He has to Deal with Some Stuff. I cried. But it’s a film about the First World War for God’s sake! It’s significant that the ‘sentimental’ happens at home, and not in action. I think this is what elevates Wings from “silly flyboy stuff” to a meaningful war film.

The first time I watched the Blu-ray version, I wasn’t sure I liked the music. Like a philistine, I thought I preferred the ersatz organ accompaniment. But although the orchestral score sounds a bit too clean and new compared to the picture, it really is superior – not least because as was common at the time, it incorporates samples from just about every great classical composer you can name. It is not as closely connected to the characters’ emotions as we often expect today, but it is far more nuanced than the organ recording.

The Oscars may be at the primordial stage, but I’ve learned that by 1927, film was quite advanced. Technology may only have been at what might be termed the Tetrapod era, but the artistic endeavour – the story, character and artistic direction – well, we’re talking opposable thumbs. Watching this film, I felt the same way as I do when reading certain classic novels: yes, the characters speak in the dialect of the period; yes, the cultural references are obsolete; but the story-telling draws you in so you barely notice. We may have got used to Talkies and Technicolor, and our attitude to the First World War may have changed, but there are so many other aspects of Wings that just haven’t got much better since 1927.

Next up: The Broadway Melody…what a change that will be!

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